For our wedding anniversary today (3 July, 2005) we opened our (single alas) bottle of the 1990 Cabernet Sauvignon. The moment I smelt the cork I knew I'd made a mistake -- this wine was not for going with our dinner. It was for sipping leisurely with friends... it was *too* *good*, and structured for drinking on its own, not with a meal.
My wife Lucy and I ended up drinking a considerable portion of the bottle before our meal.
It was beautifully balanced, with a fruity nose, and a full palate, without the hole I've come to expect from Aussie cab savs in the middle palate.
As a farewell to Dr Kirsten Birkett, who is leaving Australia to work for Oak Hill College, London we opened the '94 Heggie's Vineyard. Although it was a touch over-oaked for my taste when I first tried it in 1996, the subsequent years of bottle age had rounded the wine out. It complemented the steamed thread-fin bream very nicely indeed.
Around 1985, the quality of Marsala from R.H. Binder went down considerably. Before that, the wine was marketed only from the cellar door, in bottles with the labels hand amended to read `750ml' with `2l' crossed out. However, this bottle, from just after the downturn, appears to have improved since we bought it (after tasting the new version, we relegated it to a cooking wine for many years).
Unfortunately, when I emailed Rolf about the change in flavour, he said that they couldn't get spice mixes of the required quality any more, and so have stopped making the wine. A pity, as the original Marsala Al'Uovo was superb.